
Indeed. Picture courtesy of Chris Radley.
One of the few good things about having time off while you wait for people to heal is the opportunity for introspection it provides you with. The rare relief to take a step back and think about what you're adding to what you do.
This time off coupled with PSFK's excellent series: Spur from Redscout (brought to my attention by the super smart Gareth Kay) have meant that yes, I've been thinking about stwategy.
When I first started applying to agencies, it was deemed I was "too unorthodox" and thus wouldn't be a good account exec, and because I didn't go to art school or have a partner, it would be impossible for me to have a creative thought. So almost by default (or maybe by blogging) I was branded (get it?) a planner. I was pretty damn happy because while some of the smartest and most generous people I'd met also happened to be planner/strategy types, the vast majority of them didn't fit the image that was being projected of the account planner. Regardless, I hoped I'd be able to absorb some of that collective and individual awesomeness by osmosis.
Imagine my surprise then, at the identity crisis and the need for validation that permeates through vast chunks of the strategic community with frightening regularity.
Brand, channel, engagement, immersion, emerging media, technology and many more that I can't remember. All these words are prefixes to strategy, to planner. And I believe all are wide of the mark.
Then there are the plannery things that are to be done. Drink tea, wear a cardigan, buy suitably plannery glasses. Call yourself a geek, stare out the window, be disparaging in equal amounts about your useless account management and egotistical and petulant creatives.
Read Stephen King, romanticize about how you would run the agency, obsess over the perfect proposition, make sure you remain 'strategically aloof' in meetings so your impeccable strategic nous cannot be questioned. Sit in your ivory tower with other planners and propagate rampant intellectualism.
Use big words when smaller ones will do. Talk about doing powerpoint a hell of a lot.
Stop. being. a. douchebag.
We bemoan the fact that our clients are trapped in antiquated models of media and thinking, yet we restrict our own job descriptions with the same philosophy.
The suits 'do', the planners 'think' and the creatives 'draw/write'.
What if I want to think about something, sketch a crude solution, talk to the creatives and muck up a concept and present it to a client at the end of a weekly status? Is that cool? Will we, as individuals and a collective industry survive? WILL THE CLIENT BE OK WITH IT?!?
I had the pleasure of lunch with Paul Isakson just before Christmas last year and he said a ton of smart things, one of which I remember being:
"I stopped caring about being a planner a long time ago".
And then it struck me. The people who are the best at marketing strategy are the ones who really don't care about planning. They just solve problems.
It's something Eaon and I wrestled with at Geronimo while coming up with what we called an innovation brief. There's a real need to break out of this "Client must brief us before we can think about something" mentality that plagues the industry. If I was a client I'd be disgusted if the company I hired to solve my communication problems only thought about something when I told them to. In fact, if I didn't get proactive solutions from my agency, I'd fire them and hire somebody who would.
We figured out that essentially, our job was to identify business problems and then create solutions for said problems that were contextual, culturally relevant, rewarding and engaging for people. And then impress upon our clients the need for that solution. So that's how I define what I do. Job titles be damned.
The masses of poor quality work we see and the repeated marketing-related disasters that crop up in the trade rags weekly are in my opinion, more of an indictment of the strategic community than any other. Aren't we supposed to be the ones hired for our saber-sharp intellect? Because let's be honest, we're not here because we look good!
I think there are some broad areas that we can improve to be better (insert your choice of flavor here) strategists.
1. Understand the individual pressures of your colleagues' and clients' jobs and then impress upon them that you're not there to show them up intellectually, but to make them better at their jobs. You should want them to be valued, get promoted and to get recognized for their achievements just as much as you want those things for yourself. Measure what you do by what they are held accountable for. You'll never have an 'irrelevant' idea again.
2. Immerse yourself in humanity (it's the best phrase I could come up with). We aren't burdened by budgets or studio deadlines, so we should (as I believe was the point of planning in the first place) take time to read, watch, listen and understand everything about the world in which we live in. Not the office, not the post/zip code, not the city. But the world. What are people's cultural references? Why?
The world has never really seen the mass migration that the past 2-3 generations experienced and there is no such thing as a homogenous culture (apart form perhaps some advertising agencies staff). Whether we like it or not, it's our job to know about Lost, Twilight, Microsoft's next operating system, Mass Effect 2, Avatar and High School Musical 3, American/Pop Idol, Big Brother, what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela, Dan Brown, the resurgence of the fixie scene, the situation in Palestine, what our budget deficit is, house prices, what's on the front page of the Enquirer / Daily Mail, how factory strikes in China may constrain laptop production this year and so on and so on.
Being a sponge means when it's time to distill our thinking down to that one perfect point, we have all the raw materials we need to make that point an absolutely bone-crunchingly "Boom" point.
3. Quickly move to a place where we begin to get uncomfortable again. Shake it up. Do what you haven't done. Defy convention. Break some rules. Ask for criticism. Ask to work on the most difficult piece of business in your company. Ask for forgiveness and not for permission. Inject some passion and lava back into our workplaces. Don't let the accountants win. Everyone knows a child who always asks "Why?" until you get to a point where you just say "That's how it is!!" and the kid shoots you a look where he knows you're trying to stop the conversation. Be that kid and never stop asking why.
4. Take interest in seeing things through to the end. And figure out how you can help. It's completely alien to me how someone could 'hand off' a brief and then see it next when something is presented to a client. Being well versed in all things tech is pretty damn crucial here, to help you stay ahead of the curve as well as help you get ideas to clients quicker, get approval quicker and get to market quicker. "But you'll step on creatives' toes!!" I hear some people saying. I'm not saying do their job, I'm saying help them do it better.
5. Don't constrain your and your company's ambitions by thinking only about client communications. Please, it's only been said a gajillion times. Make things and make things happen. And make it amazing.
There are more of course, and I'm probably off-target with a lot of what I've written, but that's the comments section and y'all are for :)
Let's make strategy awesome again.

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